Vacation Interupted

Well, I guess that it is a bit anti-climactic to write about a vacation that ended so long ago...

but I feel that I left the story unfinished!

I got sick! A BAD head cold. I think that I had been fighting it off and that big hike just did me in. We spent the next day, at Rite Aid getting me some medicine and orange juice and just hanging around our camp. We met a really nice family from Duarte, which is just 30 minutes from our house. They had 3 boys and Gavin loved riding bikes, digging in the dirt and playing Pokemon with them. Ella trailed after them and had her own fun.

On Sunday, August 26th we took the gondola to the top of Mammoth Mountain... WOW! What a view. The altitude and the walking wore me out quickly and we went back to camp for more relaxing.


The next day was cloudy with lots of thunder rolling in all around us. It was gorgeous with the clouds in every possible shade of blue, gray, and lavender. We went to Convict Lake to fish and have a lovely walk amongst the elms and aspens along the shore of the lake. We had our lunch and headed back to our camp.

The last day of our trip, we spent a great deal of the morning just visiting and chatting with our new friends. At last, we packed up and headed toward home. We visited the Hot Springs, which were incredible, but have been closed to swimming due to increased volcanic activity. Yet another change, and experience I would not be sharing with my family. We stopped again at Schatt's Bakery so that we could take home some goodies. We also stopped at Dirty Sock Hot Spring. It was a place that served as an overnight stop for my family when I was a kid, as we headed up to June Lake, or Mammoth. We would pull in late at night, sleep and then get up and climb into what looked like a stone jacuzzi... a natural, sulfur hot spring that had been fortified for swimming. I remember my Dad driving along in the dark, with his nose out the window, trying to find the turnoff. At Dirty Sock, you could smell it before you could see it.

I found that this site had also changed. The pool had been rebuilt and was much larger, and I think that due to the increased volume of water, the sulfur was not as strong and the odor not nearly as pungent. The other draw back of the reduced sulfur was that the pool was VERY slimy with algae and there were TONS of dragonflies. Now, dragonfiles themselves don't bother me, but the stage before they fly... they are darting around IN the water. Needless to say, we didn't get in. But we did get "buzzed" by a jet fighter on it's way back to the Air Force Base before we left. THAT was exciting!

We arrived home, safe, tired, refreshed and rather, FILTHY. We had a great trip and look forward to our next adventure together!